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I refuse to buy a Kindle. TL;DR: ePub > Mobi, I do not support RAAS (reading as a service) Don't get me wrong, I love eBooks, and I will probably buy a Nook o
by djacobs 15y ago
I refuse to buy a Kindle.
TL;DR: ePub > Mobi, I do not support RAAS (reading as a service)
Don't get me wrong, I love eBooks, and I will probably buy a Nook or Sony Reader some day. (For now my iPad is a decent substitute.)
Why does the Kindle rub me the wrong way? It doesn't render ePub books. I think the ePub spec, though flawed, is a great tool that generally follows the spirit of Unix. It's just complicated enough to be flexible but is something that you can pretty easily craft by hand. (I'm in the middle of building a library that will make that a one-line command.)
Mobipocket, on the other hand, is an ugly format. It's binary. It's over-engineered. It's legacy. Mobipocket represents each book, magazine, or comic book on your Kindle as a database for basically the same reasons that Windows still uses the Registry. I cannot deal with such an ugly format or support an ecosystem that refuses to support better standards.
Side note: I will never invest in a proprietary book "platform" because, I like to own my books. And book "platforms" are the road to RAAS (reading as a service). Amazon doesn't have a great track record for making you feel warm and fuzzy about owning your eBooks [1]. Giving up physical books is something I might do. Giving up the right to read them when and how I want is another.
[0]: http://wiki.mobileread.com/wiki/MOBI#MOBI_Header http://wiki.mobileread.com/wiki/MOBI#MOBI_Header
[1]: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/18/technology/companies/18amazon.html http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/18/technology/companies/18ama...
- anatoly 15y agoI own a Kindle and buy books through Amazon, but strip DRM off them immediately after buying.
- swombat 15y agoHere's how to do it: http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2011/01/how-to-strip-drm-from-kindle-e-books-and-others/ http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2011/01/how-to-strip-drm-from... (I haven't tried this method, but it seems extremely straightforward)
- anatoly 15y agoThe method offered at the post urges you to install the desktop Kindle software, and de-DRMs files from its storage. That hasn't always worked in the last year, as Amazon tried to obfuscate the key storage in the desktop versions, and there's been a kind of race between Amazon and the authors of the de-DRMing tools. I don't know what the status is now, but I want to emphasize that if you own a physical Kindle you don't need to install the Kindle Windows/Mac reader at all. Just follow the instructions on the blogpost linked to in the Wired article and customize the plugin with the Kindle's serial number. To de-DRM, you then connect the Kindle to your desktop and just Add the books off Kindle as a disk drive into the Calibre library.
- seanx 15y agoFor all you ever wanted to know about removing drm: http://apprenticealf.wordpress.com/ http://apprenticealf.wordpress.com/
- pors 15y agoYou can read PDFs on a Kindle, so the step from an ePub format ebook is not to much of a hassle I'd say.
- evilduck 15y agoReading PDFs on an eInk kindle is a fairly frustrating experience. The render speed and the scaling (or constant panning) make it subpar compared to actual ebook formats.